


Daughter of Poseidon

by lismicro



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-20
Updated: 2014-04-20
Packaged: 2018-01-20 04:45:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1497136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lismicro/pseuds/lismicro
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spoilers for Season 2. Delphine tries to be a hero, but she's failing all the time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Daughter of Poseidon

**Author's Note:**

> Again, spoilers for Season 2. This was written during the hiatus, so if you’ve seen the first episode already, it doesn’t really follow canon. Still, I had it nearly ready, so I hope you all enjoy it. Angsty and sad but as always, there is light at the end of the tunnel.
> 
> Prompt and encouragement by heysoulsestra on tumblr. Thanks!

She first joins DYAD because she _cares_.

People die. They grow sick, grow old, grow tired. Take away all the external, environmental factors, and it’s almost betrayal that your body can turn against you so easily, rob you of all vitality and then give up just like that. It’s a crime against nature, and when Delphine is choosing career paths she is instantly drawn to this little battlefield that she watches under her microscope.

DYAD promises new things, great things, beyond the realm of ethics and politics for the betterment of society, and Delphine always wanted to be a hero. So when she meets Aldous Leekie for the first time, on a trip to New York City, it takes a speech and a pamphlet for her to dedicate her life to him.

Later, she’ll look back and be ashamed by how easily she was taken in, like a gnat on the surface of a Venus flytrap, but she was young and ambitious and wanted to change the world. That’s not a crime.

What she did next, however, was.

She starts work first in plants, making devastating pesticides and then splicing resistant plasmids into resulting food crops. When DYAD’s market share goes up almost 500 percent, she’s congratulated, promoted and given her own lab, working with animals this time. Chickens with shorter natural lifespans and larger reserves of muscle and fat, pigs with more edible parts and fewer inner organs. It’s profitable but deadly boring, and after three years of it Delphine is tired.

There are protestors around the facilities, always, their voices drifting up to Delphine’s lab, up on the tenth floor. With each success that comes out of DYAD’s doors, it seems the voices get louder, angrier. The protestors get more aggressive, their signs more brightly colored, their insults more pointed and hostile.

Delphine wants to fling glassware at them from above. What do they know of science? What contributions have they given to the progress of the human race?

Then, almost five years into her employment, Leekie shows up at her door and tells her to follow him.

 

*

They fly across the ocean to DYAD’s offices in New York, where they first met. When Leekie leads her to a wing of the building she’s never seen before, he pulls open a door and locks it behind the two of them. Then he hands her a dossier of information, and Delphine reads with her breath growing ever shorter in her chest.

Then she reads it again. And again, glancing briefly at Leekie’s indulgent smile. Then again, just to make sure she hasn’t inhaled any fumes that would make her hallucinate the words on the page.

“You can’t be serious.”

Her English is still spotty, but there are no words in any language to describe the awe that she feels towards the man in front of her. For the incredible boldness of what he’s done.

“I am very serious, my dear. This-“ He steps closer to her and runs a finger along the side of her face. “-is our future. We will change the world together.”

Delphine abandons everything, moves her life to the United States, and begins work immediately on the clone project, feverishly fighting to get the answers she craves. Neolution. Self-directed evolution.

In Leekie’s eyes, a human right. Maybe even a moral obligation.

The genetic identicals are entering their twenty-fourth year, now, but Delphine doesn’t get a chance to work with anything but tissue samples and charts of brain activity for the longest time.

Until one of them gets sick.

Jennifer Fitzsimmons. High school swim coach, small-town beauty, lives five minutes away from her parents. Exceedingly normal, except for the fact that she and an untold number of others shared the same origins. The same DNA, almost.

Jennifer is the first of the clones that she meets, a crown jewel of DYAD’s work and eighth wonder of the world. Delphine greets her at DYAD’s hospital, her heart in her throat when Jennifer (an actual human being, good Lord) takes and shakes her hand.

“ _Bonjour_ , my name is Delphine Cormier. _J'ai attendu pour vous._ ”

Jennifer grins.

“I’m Jennifer. I don’t know what that means, but I’m happy to see you too.”

She doesn’t look particularly sick, but she’s coughing. When they return to the hospital and Delphine draws blood samples, she coughs up more blood than enters the syringe. When Jennifer is led to the hospital bed, Delphine excuses herself and returns with Leekie to find the hem of the sheets splattered with red.

She’s uncomfortable with it at first. At the end of the day, a farmer is useless if he can’t slaughter his cows. A cook doesn’t cry when his food leaves the kitchen and never returns. A scientist doesn’t raise a specimen so she can set it free someday.

But Delphine still cares, so she accepts her task and does it to the best of her ability.

Which isn’t well, because Jennifer gets sicker.

When Jennifer is asked to come to DYAD full-time, in their equivalent of an ICU, Delphine ‘s voice is lost in the clutter of all the mementos she brings from home. A swimsuit, several posters, a teaching certificate and a box of medals. An entire bookshelf of photo albums. All her promises seem empty when she tries to reassure her that they are working ever harder, racing to find a cure.

Jennifer weakly sits on the hospital bed, pulling the covers over her skinny legs. She’s lost weight, and the muscle that once lined her powerful limbs is slowly disintegrating . Her cheeks are sunken and pale.

“Do you even know what’s wrong with me yet?”

Delphine stumbles for an answer.

“Well- we have a clue. It’s a genetic respiratory disease with few genetic markers that resemble anything we have. But the lab results are very promising, and the latest drug trial seems to be working, right?”

Jennifer shrugs.

“Well enough. But there’s no cure, is there.”

She doesn’t phrase it as a question, which is apt, because Delphine doesn’t have an answer.

“We are working on it. We will find a cure for you.”

She says with a conviction that doesn’t exist.

They do try. They use cells leftover from the original experiment, decades-old, in a vain attempt to allay the inevitable. Lung transplants are useless; Jennifer’s immune system rejects every set they try, and growing new ones would take too long to be of use. They consider animal lungs, tissue grafts, stents, blood transfusions- nothing works. They didn’t think, and now their prize is slipping away.

Months pass. The coughing doesn’t stop. Liquid turns into thick clots, then actual tissue. Jennifer loses more weight, more hair and more spirit with each passing day.

As Jennifer fades, Delphine is taken off of research duties and given the task of taking care of her full-time. Despite all her misgivings, it has become more than just a duty to her. Jennifer knows things about her that even Leekie doesn’t- her drive to change the world, her homesickness for France, a lack of luster in her life without DYAD. All this, spoken in whispers as Jennifer asks for company and Delphine is at a loss of what to say.

She cares, but it’s painful when she can’t do much else.

Delphine stays up late with Jennifer, showing her pictures of her home, family, and students, to keep her morale up. She feeds her perfectly balanced meals, and a plethora of experimental drugs that never do any good. She wipes Jennifer’s mouth of blood at steady intervals, and despairs.

After the umpteenth trial run of a useless procedure, Jennifer stops asking when she can go home. Delphine doesn’t try to reassure her that she will.

 

*

It all changes with Cosima.

Maybe it begins when she sees her for the first time, through binoculars from a car with Leekie by her side. When she received the instruction packet, with Cosima’s favorite foods and her favorite subjects and the habits of her previous girlfriends, so Delphine has a template to go off of as she becomes Cosima’s monitor. Maybe when Cosima kisses her, soft and sure, then takes her to bed, and Delphine realizes that she’s fallen hard for 324B21the same moment she realizes she can’t do this anymore.

But it really begins when Cosima turns to her with lip trembling, eyes pleading, says, “I’m sick, Delphine,” and tears Delphine’s world apart.

She goes back to DYAD in a daze the next morning, leaving Cosima sleeping peacefully in her bedroom. There is no change.

But something else has changed, now, because she can’t see Jennifer without seeing Cosima. Her hair shaved off, and the endless, endless blood, and the slow deterioration of everything that made Jennifer herself. There are times that it becomes too much, and Delphine has to leave the room feeling like a knife has been stuck in her throat because it’s like fast-forwarding to the end of a movie, just before the credits, and Cosima is the villain who dies at the end. She knows it’s terrible to replace them, to look at Jennifer and see another face when the woman is already suffering so much, but Delphine’s no longer a hero and she has no more excuses.

She is part of this. She is to blame.

Everything has become overwhelming in a way she doesn’t know how to handle.

Sarah all but disappears, driven mad in her quest to get Kira back, and Delphine helps by sneaking her plans of DYAD’s facilities and arranging secret visits to the facility with a disguised Sarah in tow. The accusation in her eyes never leaves, though, no matter what strings Delphine pulls, and she knows it won’t cease until Kira is back safe in Sarah’s arms. And maybe not even then.

Helena has been shot, Alison has signed her soul away, and Cosima is following an awfully familiar path that makes Delphine panic. Suddenly they are losing, badly. The good guys are losing, and Delphine feels useless sitting on her hands while she prowls the halls of DYAD, torn between working to find a cure that has alluded her for a year, and spending that time with Cosima. With Paul’s loyalties in question and Felix chasing down leads with Sarah, most nights it’s just her and Cosima at the loft. It’s always quiet, and dimly, with the clacking of keyboards and a heavy atmosphere of despair thick enough to choke on.

She tries some of the drugs that they used on Jennifer, that seemed to at least slow down the ravaging of the disease. When she poises the needle over the vein in Cosima’s arm, she doesn’t look up.

Cosima can’t be blamed for not wanting to fix things between them. She has her hands full. With keeping Sarah from tearing the world apart for Kira, and Allison barely evading the men who try to take her, there is no time for apologies, for rehashing, for the talks that they need to have. They have been robbed of that opportunity, those chances for redemption.

Cosima refuses Leekie’s offer, on principle, even if it means no cure to the disease. It terrifies Delphine that she may not be able to change Cosima’s mind before it’s too late.

But they both have so much on their minds, now. It’s all they can do to wake up, go to the lab, run out periodically to send Allison supplies or talk Sarah off the ledge or spy on Paul, but then it’s back to the loft late at night to catch a few hours of sleep before doing it all over again.

There had been a moment, when Cosima had first told her that she was sick, and with a crying woman in her arms Delphine had believed they had a chance. But she can’t keep something as critical as Jennifer away from Cosima (for the cure, for survival) and when Delphine tells her there is another one of them, any progress they’ve made is destroyed.

“I’m sorry!”

“Sorry for what? For not telling me- for keeping another clone a secret from me, from us? Why is she there? Are you keeping her chained up like Helena?”

Delphine presses her hands to her eyes to staunch the flow of tears, as Cosima hurls angry words at her like a barrage of missiles.

“She’s sick too; coughing up blood. Her symptoms are the same as yours. I didn’t know you had it until you told me, and there isn’t a cure. I can’t find a cure. I’m sorry.”

Cosima stops dead, her eyes blank behind her glasses. When she moves, it’s to grab her red coat from the peg and to grab the keys off the table.

“I’m going to go see her. Take me to her.”

“No, Cosima, she can’t know-“

“Don’t.” The word is whispered with so much venom that it doesn’t sound like Cosima at all, this furious syllable condensed to a furious order for Delphine to stop. Cosima tosses the keys in Delphine’s lap. “You’re not keeping this from me. Not this too.”

What can she do?

Jennifer is so ill that when Delphine walks in with Cosima in tow, she looks at the two of them in matching lab coats and only heaves a deep sigh before looking away. To be honest, dreadlocks and glasses really do a lot to change a person, and Jennifer looks at Cosima and doesn’t see her own face.

It’s probably better that way.

“More drugs?” Jennifer whispers, her voice catching at every syllable. Cosima can barely look at her face, so Delphine pipes up.

“No, not today. This is my colleague, Cosima Niehaus. She’s going to be joining us in trying to cure you.” Delphine subtlety steps backward to force Cosima to step forward, so she can look upon her fully for the first time.

“H-hello, Jennifer.” She says, shakily. Delphine watches her hand clench tightly to the fabric of her lab coat, where Jennifer can’t see.

“Thank you for coming.” Jennifer says, shortly. “Do you think there’s any hope?”

Cosima falters and shifts from leg to leg, lifting a shaking hand to readjust her glasses.

“There is always hope. Don’t give up yet.”

Jennifer doesn’t look like she believes her.

“What if I already have?”

Cosima throws a hand over her mouth but can’t quite stop the muffled sob that emits, and that happens she begins to cough, too, hacking noises that are too familiar to everyone in the room. She flees, then, and Delphine takes three steps towards her before Cosima waves her off and disappears over the corner.

The hopelessness threatens to overwhelm her.

“She’s sick too, isn’t she.” Jennifer looks at Delphine, her eyes sorrowful in a way they haven’t been for months. The disease took more than her body; none of the bright, bubbly girl that Delphine met at the airport is left of her after nearly three years of treatment. There is only a bitter, hard shell left. Delphine can only nod.

“Well, I’m not contagious, because you’re not sick.” Delphine realizes, then, that she underestimated Jennifer’s lack of perception of what was happening to her. “So we share something in common? Some gene?”

“You do. We’re trying to find some common marker that makes you two the same, but we haven’t found it yet.”

“I’m sorry, then. Tell her I’m so, so sorry.”

Delphine wants to scream that she shouldn’t be, not when she has nothing to do with it. Nothing to do with the malaise that pervades their lives. When Cosima and Delphine work together, now, they barely talk. They barely touch except to pass samples back and forth. Delphine hasn’t seen Cosima smile in days.

“Good morning. Any change?”

“Good morning. No.”

And that’s it.

Days later, there is smooth muscle tissue and clumped phagocytes turning up in Jennifer’s coughed-up blood, and Delphine begins to look into end-of-life care to stop her thinking about the inevitable. Jennifer’s lungs have been patched together by DYAD, for years, and now they are coming apart.

They lay out her limited options together, she and Cosima, sitting on her hospital bed. When her lungs give out, which will be soon, they can put her on a machine. A ventilator can buy her a few more weeks, maybe a month, but will be painful with each breath. She can have a mask, which will be more comfortable but only last a few days. Or, she can go.

DYAD doesn’t know that Jennifer has been given options. If it were up to them, they’d keep their specimen alive for as long as possible. Delphine doesn’t care.

If that’s what Jennifer wants, she’ll have it. But if she wants the opposite, she can have that too.

Jennifer doesn’t answer. Cosima and Delphine stay for hours by her bed, silent, and Jennifer still says nothing. Finally, after Cosima is called away, Jennifer speaks up.

“I don’t care.”

“Jennifer-“

“I don’t care!” She yells with the last of her breath, a trickle of red leaking from her mouth at the effort, and turns to bury her face in the pillow. She turns her back on Delphine, and no amount of pleading will get her to turn back around.

She finds Cosima in bed when she returns to the loft, wrapped in blankets and whimpering softly in her pillow, and Delphine doesn’t hesitate to tumble in beside her. The sheets are wet with tears as Cosima sniffles, and doesn’t protest when Delphine pulls her into her arms and holds her for the rest of the night.

 

*

Cosima has the idea first.

Jennifer’s birthday is coming up, and she has no expectations of celebration other than another round of intensive therapy. When Cosima hears of this, she raises a storm with Delphine, insisting they have some sort of celebration. But each birthday has just become another marker of how much time she’s been sick, and after her first year at DYAD Delphine is adamant that there be no more reminders.

Cosima, however, is known for not giving up. Her stubbornness is only one reason Delphine loves her.

When she discovers that DYAD is not only a research facility but a therapy center as well, she begins to scheme. She disappears during the nighttime for three days straight, returning a little more satisfied each time, until one night, she walks into the lab and drops a key on the table in front of Delphine. They have been working later and later hours, and it is nearly midnight.

“We’re not leaving yet. Delphine, come with me.”

“Where are we going?”

Cosima pulls her close, and whispers in her ear.

And for the first time, Delphine feels some hope.

Getting her out of the room is easy; the heavy cocktail of drugs that keeps the agony at bay is almost always in her bloodstream, and Jennifer is deep in sleep when they roll her out. Getting her anywhere else requires a little more trickery, but Cosima finds a cargo elevator that isn’t too dirty that will hold the three of them. Jennifer wakes up some time around the time they descend into the basement, and blinks blearily at the sight of Cosima inserting the stolen key into the lock.

“What’s happening?”

Delphine glances over at Cosima, who looks down at Jennifer with a smile that Delphine’s never seen before.

“It’s your birthday present. I’m sorry it took so long.”

The pool is a startling electric blue, as the moonlight spills through the windows far above them and throws dappled patterns of the water across the walls. The complete quiet stills Delphine’s breathing, their footsteps and the wheels of the hospital bed echoing across every surface. She feels like they’ve entered a cathedral, solemn and silent.

The pool is divided into lanes by blue and red floating lines, just like any swim meet. The timing board is activated and the bleachers are out, empty but filled with the expectation of roaring fans, waving towels and jumping to their feet at the end of a race, cheering for records broken and medals won.

Jennifer lifts her head up off the pillow and stops when she sees it. Her eyes widen and her mouth forms words that have no sound.

Cosima really had thought of everything.

“Water’s warm.” Cosima murmurs, removing a flotation device from the wall. They strap the equipment to Jennifer’s waist and arms, making sure that she will be safe in the water.

Jennifer doesn’t make another sound, but stares wide-eyed at the pool as they move the hospital bed closer, and then readjust it so they are inches from the ground. Cosima takes one side of her and Delphine takes the other, and together they shift towards the water.

As they lower her carefully into the pool, starting with her feet and moving to submerge her legs and torso, Jennifer opens her eyes and gasps out loud. When they slowly release her, giving her freedom again, Delphine barely has time to get out of the way before Jennifer moves on her own, setting out for the opposite shore.

She moves her arms weakly but at a steady pace, cutting a clean stride through the water as her legs waver in and out of view behind. When she reaches the middle of the pool she reaches out for the line and rests for a minute, arms draped over the divider. She smiles, still a little stunned, at the two of them still on dry land, and finishes the lap.

It is startling, the difference that the water seems to make. In the water, Jennifer looks calm, healthy, the glow returned to her cheeks and the smile permanently fixed on her face. She hasn’t coughed once.

It’s the water pressure, but Delphine chooses to believe in a miracle. The tears prick at her eyes as she watches Jennifer make unhurried progress towards one side of the pool to the other, going a little slower each time. Delphine presses a hand to her mouth and tries her hardest not to cry.

Jennifer dunks her head under, briefly, and then spins to the surface, her hair slicked back and rivulets of water running down her face. Jennifer looks up at the ceiling and gently tilts back, her arms loose at her sides and her eyes closed.

She floats.

Delphine sits by Cosima at the edge, their feet dipped in the warm water. Cosima’s hand is on top of hers.

They seem suspended in time for years, centuries, as Jennifer swims, but both of them can tell when the momentary burst of strength leaves their ward and her frequent pauses to grab at the floating dividers turn permanent. Then Cosima wades out, fully clothed, into the water, and takes Jennifer by the shoulders. She begins to kick, gently, and tows the two of them backwards to shore.

Delphine helps Jennifer sit on the steps leading into the pool, stabilizing her against her own legs.

“You did great.”

Jennifer only smiles and nods, as if she can’t quite believe it.

“I’ll go get some towels.” Cosima says, and disappears into the locker room. Jennifer turns to Delphine, her eyes heavy and droplets still sliding down her skin. Delphine, one arm wrapped around Jennifer’s shoulders and the other dabbling in the water, smiles at her-and in doing so, doesn’t see Cosima.

“I’ve changed my mind.” Jennifer whispers, her eyes dropping. Her chest heaves as if to cough, but nothing comes out. Even the short swim has exhausted her, but the radiant happiness on her face outshines any of the tiredness. “I know what I want to do.”

“Yes?” Delphine asks.

“When I die-“ Delphine makes a short, distressed sound that Jennifer muffles with one shake of her head. “-when I die, take my body away from DYAD. Take me somewhere safe. Take me- and save Cosima.”

“You will not die. We will find some cure-“

“I might _be_ the cure. At least, I will help you find it.” Jennifer says, a sort of feverish excitement taking hold of her. Her fingers latch onto Delphine’s arm with a strength missing for weeks, and she doesn’t let go. “You have to see the pieces to see how to fix it, right? Maybe you can learn something from me.”

“You can’t talk like this.” Delphine says, distressed. “You have to keep believing that you can make it.”

Jennifer smiles, ruefully.

“ _J'ai attendu pour vous. I have been waiting for you._ That’s what you said to me, when we first met, right? You have been, but for the wrong reasons. This could save her.”

Delphine buries her head in her hands, as Jennifer continues.

“You can be a hero, Delphine. You can save her, and I can help. I want to help. It’ll be the best thing I ever do, if I can save her life.”

The whole exchange takes but a minute, but when Cosima returns Jennifer is sleeping soundly, still half-floating and cradled in Delphine’s arms. They lift her gently onto the bed, draped in towels, and Cosima kneels at the Delphine’s side to catch her breath.

“Forgive me.” Delphine rushes out, all her breath leaving her lungs. Her tears haven’t dried on her cheeks.

“What?” Cosima asks, startled.

“For all I have done, I beg forgiveness. Please, forgive me.”

Cosima reaches forward and cups Delphine’s cheek, wiping away a tear with her thumb. Her eyes don’t accuse her of anything.

“I forgive you.”

She leans forward, and they share a chaste, gentle kiss, as the water laps against the pool’s edge and Jennifer sleeps peacefully beside them. Delphine presses her forehead to Cosima’s and feels hope for the first time in what seems like forever.

When the moment has passed, they stand together and raise Jennifer’s bed back up.

“When she wakes up, I’m going to tell her.” Delphine says, rolling the cart slowly to the elevator. Jennifer doesn’t wake this time, as they ascend back to her room.

“About?”

“About you, about us. She should know she has allies.” Delphine replies. Cosima nods.

Jennifer has sisters. And she has Delphine.

 


End file.
